It's not Russia. It's not al Qaeda. It's not Bashar al-Assad. The
other super power is the people of the world -- and the people of, but
not by or for, the United States.

The world's people are protesting. U.S. citizens abroad are
protesting at U.S. embassies. The British Parliament said no to war for
the first time since Yorktown.

The U.S. polls began with single-digit support for attacking Syria,
climbed a little with the corporate media onslaught, and then started
sinking again as the propaganda push shifted into self-defeating top
gear.

Taking the stage after Colin Powell, the Obama-Kerry war marketing
team was compelled by public pressure, foreign pressure,
government-insider pressure, past public statements, and the inability
of even the corporate media to keep a straight face, to take this war
proposal to Congress -- and to do so while Congress members and senators
were at home in their districts and states, where people were able to
get in their faces.

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Congress has been feeling the heat. Sure, there is greater
willingness by some Republican members to oppose a war if the president
is a Democrat. But there are also Democrats openly supporting the war
because the president wants them to. The decisive factor has been
public pressure. Senators and representatives have been turned around
by their constituents, and that minority still supporting an attack on
Syria openly says they're defying the people who elected them. If there
is no vote in Congress, it will be because the vote would fail.

Secretary Kerry stressed on Monday that he hadn't been serious about a
diplomatic solution. It was just "rhetoric." He was just pointing out
the "impossibility" of Assad handing weapons over. He didn't want
anyone to take it seriously. Not when we have to get a war started. Not
when the clock is ticking and he has already Colin-Powelled himself in
front of his old committee with his wife behind him and protesters with
bloody hands filling the room and everybody snickering when he claimed
al Qaeda would install a secular democracy. Not after all THAT!

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How can you ask a man to be the last one to lie for a dead idea?

But warmongering senators and presidents and presidential wannabes
jumped at the chance of a way out of watching Congress vote down a war,
and watching Congress vote down a war because we made them do it.
Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee has a proposal for a diplomatic
resolution. Republican Congressman Chris Smith has proposed a United
Nations war crimes tribunal. (One might hope it will even look at the
crimes of both sides in the Syrian war.) The always obvious, but
hidden, fact that there are alternatives to bombing people is bursting
out all over.

Sure, some people dislike this war because it would cost money, or
because the Iraqis are ungrateful for the destruction of their country,
or because Obama was born in Africa, but mostly people oppose this war
for very good reasons -- and the financial cost is not really a bad
reason. From right to left, people don't think the United States should
be the world's vigilante. From left to right, people don't believe the
justifications presented without evidence. From right to left, people
understand that killing people with the right weapons to protest their
being killed with the wrong weapons is little bit crazy. From left to
right, people don't believe tales of short and easy wars that will pay
for themselves. And, across the political spectrum, people have begun
to be able to smell lies, even when those lies are wrapped in flags and
uniforms.

We should give our government credit for listening -- if it listens.
By no means are we out of the woods yet. If you want to be able to say
you were part of the movement that prevented a U.S. war, now is the time to email and telephone and join in activities.
We should not, however, fantasize that our government secretly held our
position against the war it was trying to roll out, before we compelled
it to hold our position.

Let them thump their chests a bit about how their threats won
something out of Assad, if that allows their war fever to pass. But
don't for a minute lose the significance of what the U.S. public has
done to the otherwise broken U.S. government. Out of whatever
combination of factors, it just may turn out that we've stopped a war.
Which means that we can stop another war. Which means that we can begin
to work our way out of the war machine that has eaten our economy, our
civil liberties, our natural environment, and our soul.

Assad may be lying. Or Obama may lie that Assad is lying. Or this
whole thing may otherwise fall apart and the push for this war be back
with a full-court press on Congress. But we can stop it if we choose to do so.
We can push as hard for peaceful solutions in Syria as we've pushed to
prevent the bombs from falling. In fact, we can push 10 times harder.

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And the warmakers will be back with another war. Have no fear of
that. Seriously, have no fear of it: We are a super-power. They are a
vestige of a barbaric practice that has become an anachronism even while
remaining our largest public investment. They are dinosaurs. They'll
come back with a "defensive war". That was their biggest failure this
time; they didn't make Syria a threat. Senator Harry Reid on Monday
painted Syria as Nazi Germany, but he sounded like Elmer Fudd warning of
a killer rabbit.

Laughter is our most potent tool. We must mock their
fear-mongering. We must laugh at their claims of power and benevolent
intent. We must ask to see the list of nations that are grateful for
past bombs. We must inquire whether senators who play video poker while
debating war plans, or secretaries of state who promise wars that will
be both tiny and significant with no impact and a decisive result, are
perhaps in need of better medication.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)